Today we had a meeting where we are setting up a pilot project to let our students run a games server on campus. Previously this has been a fraught business, with concern about bandwidth use and system management from all sides. However, after an enlightened decision from the university Computer Users Group we are now opening up some bandwidth monitored ports onto the student cluster in freeside.
This could be fun...
I'm thinking of getting some paving stones made out of drums.
Then people really would beat a path to my door.
I've been using a new mechanism to make sure that the readership of these august pages is holding up (not sure what you are holding up actually, but from here it looks like your hands need washing).
Anyhoo, I've been using this new service from Google Analytics, which lets me see who has been visiting the page, what time they came, whether they were wearing a tie, etc, etc. It is very powerful. It has lots of things you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and page design, see how far most people go through your content and the like. Most people seem to arrive at my site, take one look at the opening page and then vanish at speed.
Such is life.
If you run a proper web page which actually has serious intent you should take a look at the service, I can see how it could be very useful.
There is talk of a new version, which will let you find out how many people have visited your web site on the way back from the pub. That is going to be called "Google Paralytics".
Spent Sunday eating Sunday dinner, mowing the lawn and washing the car. This is all very middle class and boring. Next week I plan to eat the car, wash the lawn and mow dinner.
Drove to Durham today. Number one son (and his PS3) are now back in study mode, whatever that is.
I've just done some digging. You can buy our book at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. If you buy one and bring it along to me you can have a signed copy. Or you could buy one and sign it yourself. I'm easy either way.
Oh, and there is no truth in the rumour that it comes with a set of crayons.
I'm a happy bunny. The weather is good. The book is written. And I've got a working PDF output program for Vista.
Perhaps I'm setting my sights a bit low; other people might wish for riches or movie star looks whereas I'm happy with a bit of sunshine, a few pages of text and Primo PDF.
Mind you, according to a survey this week the key to happiness is maintaining low expectations...
Some of our students have been having fun with threading and forms (there is a lab out there at the moment which can be solved by creating a thread which performs a task).
Threads are great, because you can send them off to do something while you get back to responding to the user, or whatever. Snag is, when another thread tries to dicker with the contents of a form this ends in tears, as the Windows system is very picky about actions like this. There is a way round the problem though, and so I've written a little sample application which shows you how to do it.
It creates a form which has a single button on it. When you press the button it creates a worker thread and fires it off in another class to do something. When the something finishes it then calls back into the form to change the text in a label on that form. You can use this as a model for whatever you fancy doing with threads. You can find the code here.
Did the paper review this morning, which meant getting up bright and early. I don't know how the people at the radio station do it every day.
One of my students told me that they woke up to the sound of my voice on the radio, which is apparently really scary...
The University now has a second Robert Miles working for it. As if one wasn't enough. You can find out more about him here.
What are the chances eh?
Earlier this morning I was wondering how I was going to spend all this new free time that I have now that the writing on the book is finished.
This afternoon I found out. I get to clean mouse droppings out of the summer house. The pesky little rodents had made their way back in over the winter and seemed to have held a particularly messy party in my gardening gloves.
Lovely.
Number one son told me an amazing (and probably internet derived) "fact" today. Apparently there is one CCTV camera for every twelve people in Britain.
I wonder where mine is. And who the other eleven people are....
The office hasn't changed much in the week or so I've been away from it (i.e. it is still a mess). I'm tempted to have a bonfire or something to get rid of some stuff, but I'm not sure if this is allowed under health and safety. Even if we had marshmallows.
The chapters of the book are now all in. And so am I. I think I'll go back to work tomorrow for a rest.
I wonder if I'll get one.
Most of the writing is now done. Just a few bits left to add. So we went to the seaside. I really like Hornsea. It has a faded charm that I find really attractive. Number one son and I took our cameras, and we were dead lucky because the light was lovely for photographs.
Beach front
Asset stripped
Indoor amusements
Windmills
Hornsea Mere Tea Rooms. Fantastic.
This pike is over 100 years old.
I once got a hole in one here. Snag is, it was the wrong hole....
Boats
Sometimes to solve a problem you have to go and live there. And that is where I've been these last few days. Living in a book. Although I've actually done quite a lot since the last post.
I'll catch you all up with these things as soon as all the pictures have uploaded onto Flickr.
I actually own a useful robot. Amazing. I've got some useless ones too, but this one actually does something that number one wife thinks is good. It does the vacuuming. You plonk it down in the middle of a room, give it a kick and off it trundles, bouncing off furniture and cleaning as it goes. And it does a creditable job. To be sure, we did have to clear a bit of junk off the floor to give it a free run, and it does take longer than I would, but the evidence in the dust collector is clear, it cleans.
We set it loose in the bedroom and it rumbled about for a while. When I caught up with it later it was coughing a bit, and upon inspection it had picked up a lot of dust (it had been wandering about underneath things), an umbrella cover and 20 pence. I emptied it all out, charged the battery and off it went again. The device itself is beautifully engineered. It bristles with sensors so that it really can follow a wall, detect and manage collisions with obstacles and avoid falling down stairs (it is especially good at that one). And it has a bunch of brushes and proper filters and stuff. It really is a vacuum.
The funny thing is that I didn't really select it for its cleaning prowess. I was more interested in the interfacing potential for the Micro Framework book that I'm presently writing. The robot exposes a software interface into which you can plug a computer. It works too. I've had C# programs in a Micro Framework telling the robot what to do, which is very nice. But now number one wife wants it to clean the conservatory, so I'll have to get on with something else.
Today is Easter Bank holiday. Wish I worked in a bank.
Indeed she does. Very well. Number one son spotted that she was appearing in York, and so off we toddled. I took the big camera, but I might as well have not bothered. The lights were a bit low and even with the camera gain turned up to 11 it was hard to get any good photos.
Laura in red (and that is a sock over the microphone)
She played mostly new stuff, which was alright by me. She does have an amazing voice and her band were absolutely top notch.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
